Production-Ready CodeIgniter 4 + Docker Stack with CI/CD in Less than 10 Minutes

The Problem Every PHP Developer Knows

You start a new CodeIgniter 4 project. Before writing a single line of business logic, you spend hours on setup: getting Docker to work, configuring Nginx, wiring PHP-FPM, setting up MySQL and Redis, making PHPUnit run inside the container, and then figuring out why your CI pipeline fails on the first push.

That setup time is dead time. It does not ship features. It does not impress clients.

And you do it again on the next project.

This article walks through the complete stack I built to solve that, and how it gets you from zero to a running, tested, production-ready CI4 environment in under 10 minutes.